ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts blog seeks to bring together all levels of project management and business analysis expertise, from diverse industries and perspectives, across business groups and information technology. Our goal is build successful collaboration and share content, best practices, techniques, and networking.

PW&WCBA bridges the gap between theory and practices by
championing and celebrating the role of the PM and BA as true contributors to
the overall business with specific examples of how and why, and new ideas to
help you achieve more.

Thank you to all who joined us at PW&WCBA 2013. Your
enthusiasm for exchanging new practices by engaging with industry leaders and
your peers made it a success.

To continue the discussions well into 2014, we encourage
everyone to join us on LinkedIn,
Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to our Blog. These social media communities are
global networks of professionals from all industries who share a common goal to
develop and innovate towards the best project management and business analysis
landscape.

Monday, January 20, 2014

ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts is
providing several upcoming webinars as one of many educational programs for
project management and business analysis professionals. PW&WCBA is the
industry's year round resource for project managers, portfolio managers and
business analysts who wish to move beyond the fundamentals and learn
leadership, strategy and enterprise wide information in order to be more
valuable for their organization.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Papers
are being accepted on a rolling basis, we suggest your proposal as early as
possible. If this is something you're interested in considering, please let us know
as sessions fill up quickly. Submit your proposal no later thanFriday,
January 17th
to Romina Kunstadter, Conference Producer at rkunstadter@iirusa.com or 646.895.7453.

The Institute for International Research (IIR) is currently seeking corporate
practitioners, authors and experienced facilitators to present at the 2014
ProjectWorld® & World
Congress for Business Analysts® conference.

The event will take place in September, 2014 in Seattle, Washington. Exact
Dates and Location will be announced in the coming weeks.
About this Unique EventPW&WCBA
is the industry's year round resource for gaining cutting-edge insights through
C-Level case studies & corporate best practice presentations, exclusive Web
Seminars, Learning Labs, and facilitated sharing sessions.
Who & What We're Looking For

Leaders of high profile, complex projects to share their story in an open
forum with industry peers. We are also inviting highly experienced,
unbiased project managers, program managers, portfolio managers, PMO heads,
system engineers and business analysts. We are particularly interested in
experienced corporate practitioners, industry experts and qualified
facilitators sharing innovative case studies, techniques, templates that
attendees can implements as soon as they get back to the office.

Each presentation should demonstrate actionable tangible takeaways. We are
looking for presentations that will demonstrate how something went from concept
to reality (what were the decisions you had to make along the way, why did you
choose that route, what did you learn from it, what if anything would you do
differently, what can the audience learn, where do you go from here?).

Please note: Decisions will be based on the alignment of the content with the
2014 agenda content, feedback from the event advisors as well as on industry
recognition and/or personal references.

We Expect Our Speakers to Move Beyond the Fundamentals2014
presentation topics include, but are not limited to:

Managing
Stakeholder Expectations

Leveraging
Portfolio Project Management Tools

Education
& Training for New PM's- Passing down the knowledge

Integration
PM

Setting up a
Project Office

Communication
Across Roles (Organization)

Using Agile
to Implement Larger Multi Web Projects

Tools Used
with Agile

Moving from
BA to PM

Discovering
What Metrics you Need

Lean
Projects: A Case Study

PM & BA
Collaboration

Risk
Management

Program &
Portfolio Management

Effective
Teams: How to build them

Cyber
Security

Big Data
& Analytics

PMBOK Changes

Dealing with
Stakeholders and Sponsors

Integrating
Contracted People into an Ongoing Project

Mobile

Creative
Problem Solving

Collaborative
Problem Solving

Honing Your
PM Skills

Virtualization

Understanding
The Business Ecosystem

The Move:
Agile to Waterfall

Convan Vs
Agile

Process
Management

Developing BA
Skills

Effective
Data Modeling

State
Modeling

BA's in A
Global Environment

Capturing Non
functional requirements

Shadow IT and
how to make sure you remain a partner

Managing to
scale

Tailor BA
function in an onshore vs offshore environment

Systems
Integration

What's New in
Agile?

Agile, Tools
and Metric Tracking

Cloud Risk:
Managing the Risk and Rewards of Cloud Computing

Defining and
Developing the Next Generation of PMs

Improving the
Value of Your PMO

IT Portfolio
Management

Soft
Leadership Skills

Risk
Management

Building
Program Management Expertise

Motivating
Teams and Increasing Team Performance

Creating a
Center of Excellence (Both BA and/or PM)

Demonstrating
the Current Value of Project Management and Business Analysis to Your
Organization

Career Paths
for the BA and PM - Where Do You Go After 5 Years?

Using Six
Sigma and LEAN to Improve Project Management

Requirements
Management and Communication

Leading
Global Teams

Change
Management

Reading
Verbal and Non-Verbal Cues

Virtual
Engagement

Lightweight
Project Management Tools vs. Heavyweight

Enterprise
Analysis

Enterprise
Architecture

Negotiation
Skills for Dealing with Suppliers

Agile Project
Management

A Systematic
Approach to Increase Business Process Performance

Improving
Service Levels with Your Stakeholders

Business
Analysis Planning and Monitoring

Developing a
PM Toolkit: The Essentials

Implementing
a Portfolio Management

Estimating
and Identification of Requirements

Business
Rules: An Important Technique to Capture and Discover What You Need

Green
Practices for the PM and BA

Getting the Benefits
of Consolidating, But Without Doing So

The Current
and Future State of the BA

Agile:
Governance and Decision-Making

Sustainable
Portfolio Management Practices

Development
Techniques that are Flexible and Responsive

SOA
Governance

Integrating
the Business Architecture with Human Performance

BONUS:
In addition to the exposure and honor of being a speaker, speakers will
also FREE admission to the conference, access to post-conference
web seminar series as well as any pre-conference activities (a $3,000+ value).

How to Get AcceptedPriority
will be given to presentations that highlight NEW case studies on pushing
beyond the PMBOK and BABOK, presenting new skills, techniques and best
practices for today's PM and BA worlds. ONLY corporate/client-side speaker
will be considered. If you are a consultant, solution provider, technology
provider, analyst or consultant, please see sponsorship/exhibit section below.

Sponsorship & Exhibition OpportunitiesIf you are a vendor or solution provider and are interested
in showcasing your organization's expertise - Please contact Jon Saxe, Senior
Business Development Manager at jsaxe@iirusa.com or 646.895.7467 for more
information.

If you were not selected to present and are a vendor or solution provider, you
may qualify for additional speaking opportunities available through
sponsorship.

Submission GuidelinesPlease
submit the following to Romina Kunstadter, Conference Producer at rkunstadter@iirusa.com no later than Friday, January
17, 2014.

For
proper consideration, please include the following information with your
proposal:

Proposed speaker name(s), job title(s),
and company name(s)

Contact information including address,
telephone and e-mail

Title and objective of presentation

Please indicate which topic you plan to
address and please indicate what is NEW about the presentation

Summary of the talk

What the audience will gain from your
presentation (please list 3-5 key "take-aways")

NEW FOR THIS YEAR: Please submit
a short video telling us why you want to speak at PW&WCBA 2014
(optional, but preferred)

If
your submission is selected, portions of your bio and summary will be used to
promote your participation. In an effort to ensure the utmost quality, all
final presentations will be subject to review by our content review board one
month prior to the event.

Additional Details

Commercialism and self-promotion are
NOT permitted or tolerated. If this happens, you will NOT be invited to
return as a speaker.

Travel, lodging and other expenses are
the responsibility of the speaker.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

As we enter the New Year it is interesting to reflect on the
previous year and forecast new trends for 2014. The project management space
went through some impactful changes in 2013, which has set it up for major
growth this year.

According to Tech
Republic, here are five key project management trends you should watch for this
year:

1. Project management
roles continue to develop in the business function.

These days, the concept of a project manager is no longer
restricted to just IT. Years ago, system implementations were only staffed with
IT project managers who had project responsibilities. Now, organizations are
getting smarter as they begin to mirror the IT project management role to
ensure successful implementations. This year, the concept of establishing
a business owner to represent the department's IT priorities will continue to
grow, and the business lead will take on business-related project management
tasks and work directly with the IT project management staff.

2. More project
schedules will move to the cloud.

In 2014, more businesses will move to cloud-based tools to
support scheduling and collaboration. Tools like LiquidPlanner, AtTask, ProjectManager.com, Wrike,
and Gantter have useful project scheduling tools that are competitors with Microsoft
Project. In 2013, Microsoft's Project Online with Office 365 also
introduced improved web-based scheduling with its flagship product. These solution providers will continue to
innovate the project scheduling domain, and more businesses will take advantage
of scheduling tools that are platform independent and work in mobile
environments.

3. Online
collaboration tool adoption will increase.

Web-based document sharing solutions have been around for
some time, but they are being replaced by collaboration platforms that move
teams into the collaboration platform. In 2014, more businesses will adopt
collaboration tools like tibbr, Asana, Trello, and Siasto to
provide project management support. As the collaboration space improves,
platforms will provide an integrated collaboration suite instead of instant
messaging, document management, and desktop sharing tools.

4. There will be more
of a reliance on resource management.

In 2014, with scheduling centralized, resource management
becomes a feasible option. PMOs will develop a better view into the work
pipeline and in determining existing capacity. By integrating project schedules
with task tracking, real-time resource curves can be developed to obtain a top-down
view of the project pipeline. Using the platform, data-driven decisions will
improve decisions instead of guessing over who has capacity to take on
additional work.

5. Distributed teams
will continue to grow.

Collaboration tools help flatten the obstacles to
communication, enabling organizations to access talent across the state,
country, and world without relying on co-location. Just a few years ago, conference
calls and text messaging were the predominant means to collaborate as a distributed
group, but this year, better collaboration tools will improve the way teams
work in greater distances.

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and
print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing,
and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs
including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business
Analysts. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a
Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the
technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow
her at @AmandaCicc.